Problem #1: There is no “workflow” for the real-time Web.Example: Apple just came out with a “new MacBook Pro” with “Retina Display”. I need to track and compare both of these other topics. Ug. Now I need to create a whole new project from scratch.

Problem #2: Sometimes we come up with new ideas–or simply change our mind.Example: Actually, now I want to see what people are saying and how the top keywords compare. No, wait. I want to see how they are trending instead. BTW–I am following the live stream from today’s WWDC. Oh! Man, I really want to track the new “iOS 6” and “iCloud” that was just announced as well…

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Join us, March 1, 10AM PST/1PM EST, as we learn how Chrysler, Ford and GM have marketed their comeback stories and how America is buying in on the real-time Web.

Every month, Netvibes Insights takes you behind the scenes of today’s top brands using dashboard intelligence. Who are the influencers? How do people perceive their products? What are the differences between their social media strategies?

This month’s session is “Detroit 2.0: The Big 3 Go Social”. Detroit is back. A new, much more social Detroit now leads the way in both technical and social innovation. See how Chrysler, Ford and GM are bringing customers back through social media. Together with auto industry experts, we’ll take a live look at:

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This is huge for Netvibes and great news for our users. The product, brand and team stays the same, but our ability to innovate will be greatly enhanced. So, why did we choose Dassault Systèmes and where is Netvibes headed? Continue Reading

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To all our users, thank you for your quick feedback about our new idle mode. I wanted to take a brief moment to discuss a little bit about why we created this feature, a workaround for those that don’t want it, and what our commitment is to you and all our users.

The real-time Web is a balancing act. Everyone remembers Twitter’s early days with frequent service interruptions. Speed often comes at an expense, obviously, in server costs, but also in terms of reliability. In the not too distant past, traditional websites only had to serve one page per pageview. Today, real-time Web services and live updates can mean continually serving hundreds or thousands of updates for each pageview.

Our challenge:What makes Netvibes so great is that we ping all your feeds and services for updates minute by minute, so you can see a live river of content. We aggregate multiple real-time Web services, from Twitter to Facebook, and more than 1,000,000 different newsfeeds – all constantly updated automatically for our users. This represents about 10,000,000 new items to collect, every day.

Our solution: idle mode. We wanted to create a solution that would be transparent (so our users are aware) and invisible (so as not to cause annoyance). In our first iteration last week, idle mode would kick in after 20 min of inactivity and required users to click to reconnect. Thanks to your feedback, we quickly realized that this was interrupting the user experience – we heard ya!

Our dev team immediately worked around the clock to make it more unobtrusive. Now users can restore their session simply by moving their mouse. Moreover, we continue to count and update your feeds in the background–you can still see the number of new articles climb, even when in idle mode.

This is a critical issue of fairness for all users. Without idle mode, our inactive or “away” users would inadvertently slow down the network for active users. We feel this is the best and fairest solution for maintaining speed and reliability all our users.

Why did Netvibes implement idle mode?

Speed. Less load means greater speed and reliability for users that are active. By implementing idle mode for users that are inactive for 20 min or more, we can save nearly 2/3 of our server load – which means more resources are liberated for our active users.

Economics. We are committed to keeping Netvibes.com free and ad free. We do this in by generating revenue from our business Dashboard Intelligence products. And we do this by being efficient with our bandwidth and distributing it fairly to active users who need it most.

Workaround?
We realize that there is an elite population of Netvibes users who need idle mode turned off. This includes professionals and organizations who want to monitor feeds all day on dedicated second monitors. These types of users would benefit from the Netvibes VIP service. Netvibes VIP members can disable idle mode and they also benefit from personalized project support and guaranteed service agreements – for only €29,90/year, which is just $0.10/day.

Let’s be perfectly clear: This is by no means an attempt to brick our service and force users to become Netvibes VIPs (especially at 10 cents a day!). This is an issue of fairness, speed, sustainability and economics to continue to provide our free users with an ad free service and to empower professional users who want customized support to get what they need. By so doing, we hope to meet the needs of all our different types of users.

Again, thank you for all your patience, understanding and honest feedback.

Freddy Mini CEO Netvibes

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Ever since we introduced the concept of Dashboard Intelligence, we’ve received great feedback and questions about how to use Netvibes professionally for real-time business intelligence. Today, we’ve launched a new website that has everything you need to know about Dashboard Intelligence. Check it out at business.netvibes.com!

What is Dashboard Intelligence?
Dashboard Intelligence (DI) is business intelligence evolved for the real-time Web. (We hesitate to simply call it “BI 2.0”, because it’s much more than that.)

Traditional business intelligence applies business logic to corporate databases to create analytic reports and automate standard business processes. This worked great in the ‘90s, when you could impress your boss by turning last month’s sales data into this month’s sales report. But today, the real-time Web is infinitely faster, vaster and more chaotic than any corporate database and business intelligence can’t keep up. (In fact, new research indicates this may be the reason why Enterprise 2.0 isn’t growing as fast as expected; see our report on GigaOm.)

This is where DI comes in. Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence makes the daily chaotic flow of Tweets, feeds, websites, apps and social sentiments manageable and meaningful. The best part is that unlike traditional business intelligence, which is optimized for large corporations, DI can help any-sized team or organization save enormous amounts of time, boost real-time knowledge sharing, and make faster, better decisions.

How does the DI process work?
Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence operates on a new three step process:

1. Listen to Everything – The first step is to regain control over your daily workflow by monitoring everything, both internally (databases, CRM, ERP, etc.) and externally (feeds, blogs, Tweets, friends, customers, clients), all in one real-time dashboard.

2. Learn from Everyone – Next, extract real meaning and knowledge by using smart tagging and filters to pull best ideas, key trends, and hidden experts to the top of the stack.

3. Act in Real-Time – Finally, send live mobile alerts to decision makers, automate reports, and trigger real-time business decisions to stay ahead of the competition.

Over the next few weeks, we will be posting articles and hosting webinars to present Dashboard Intelligence in detail with real-world examples using Netvibes. So stay tuned! In the meantime, you can learn more about each step, and request a demo, on our new Dashboard Intelligence website: business.netvibes.com

As you know, Netvibes dashboards are the perfect solution to monitor, listen and act on everything using hundreds of professional widgets for performing real-time analysis, trend reporting, team tasks and other business processes. You’ve always been able to monitor all your feeds and run all your widgets side by side in our Widget view.

But what about when you’re in Reader view?

Today we’re pleased to introduce a new feature in our Reader view called the Livebar. The Livebar is an active sidebar that lets you run your favorite listening widgets and professional apps side-by-side with the Reader. Now you can instantly pull up your work tools for quick tasks without interrupting your concentrated reading experience.

For example, you can quickly access your Twitter widget so you can track new trending topics you find or talk with your followers about a cool new article you read. You can also access professional analytics services, like Radian6, and perform searches and analysis related to what you’re reading.

You can also use it to maintain a quick and easy access to the things that matter to you: audio sources for instance (like podcasts and webradio widgets) or any other kind of medias (wallpapers feeds, pictures of the day, videos, etc.).

To try it out, log on to your dashboard, then switch to Reader view. Edit any widget and click on the brand new “Add to Livebar” option at the top to copy it to the Livebar. Notice that you can open and close the Livebar simply by clicking the vertical border on the right side of the screen. So it’s never in the way when you want more space for your feeds.

Netvibes is the first and only reader designed for real, professional use – for busy people who need to monitor many things at once, listen to key trends and sentiments at once, and take action using multiple work tools at once. SmartTagging and Livebar are two important new features we’ve introduced recently to help professionals self-organize all their content and access all their work tools, respectively.

This year, we’ll continue to add other powerful Dashboarding Intelligence features to help transform your dashboard into the ultimate business intelligence solution for Monitoring, Listening and Taking Action across the real-time Web and your organization.

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The entire Netvibes team would like to wish you a happy new year and thank you for your incredible and undying support. This year was a big year for us: not only did we celebrate our fifth birthday and reach profitability, we also took Business Intelligence for the real-time Web to the next level, along with other improvements to our core product. We have been raising the bar once again and will continue to do so over the course of 2011. As usual, please don’t hesitate to send us feedback or suggestions.

We are all excited to enter this new year and will be working around the clock to serve you better.

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If you read our blog on a regular basis, you already now that during LeWeb, the big annual gathering about all things Internet, we launched a big scale live test of our new SmartTagging feature. The time has come to assess this first full scale test.

In short, if you don’t have time to read it all, let’s just say that SmartTagging is a process implemented on our professional dashboards through which you can tag all relevant information with sentiments and then share this expertise with your collaborators.

A useful tool to monitor the competition on the Web or centralize the information feeds on a particular subject and then bring a qualitative added value.

For instance, it allowed us to get a grasp of the general feeling from LeWeb visitors who used our feature.

It also allowed us to identify keywords (brands, people, topics, etc.) for which people gave an “awesome” sentiment (but this works with other sentiments as well, whether good or bad).

Finally, it allowed us to also identify key trends (i.e. the most tagged keywords) during the event.

And this is only a fraction of the possibilities of what SmartTagging can help you achieve. SmartTagging can assist you in getting the best of specific events (like LeWeb in our example) or help your company on a daily basis to transform everyday work actions into key trends, reports and alerts, trigger business processes and enable real-time decision making within organizations.

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In today’s fast-paced information society, it is becoming more and more important for businesses to be able to transform the daily chaos of the real-time Web into tangible trends, alerts and business processes.

“Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence evolved as a way for businesses to capture and convert RSS feeds, Web searches, Tweets, team conversations, and social interactions into tangible trends, alerts and business action based on real-time dashboards.” (Freddy Mini, CEO, Netvibes)”

Monitor Everything on real-time dashboards, from competitors to customers

Self-organize millions of intangible actions within a company into tangible trends

Alert and activate business processes automatically and instantly

SmartTagging can capture hidden value generated by everyday work activities. Users won’t need to learn any complex new tools—they will soon be able to simply click and tag anything they access online or within the company with their personal sentiment and share their expertise with the entire organization.

SmartTagging can transform everyday work actions into key trends, reports and alerts to trigger business processes and enable real-time decision making within organizations.

For more information on Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence, including a video presentation, research articles, live examples and whitepapers, visit: http://business.netvibes.com.

Starting today, now you can “dashboard anytime” and continue to read your favorite feeds even when you’re offline. Now when you go offline, you will see a special notification that you’re in “offline mode” and you can still continue to read articles. Even better, you can organize articles and mark posts to read them later when you get back online.

The next time you go back online, your read/unread counts and Read Later lists will automatically be synced to your account and all of your other devices. This means that even if you’re in a subway under the ocean or on a plane up in the sky, you can continue to read all your feeds, and when you get back to your home or office, it will all be synced up! How cool is that?

As you know, Netvibes is not a startpage. It’s an enterprise strength real-time dashboard that’s also used by agencies, brands, governments and enterprises around the world. Our latest innovations this year enable world-class organizations to “dashboard everything, anywhere, anytime across all devices”, even while traveling in locations without Internet access. This makes sure that you can be always on, even when you’re on the go.